The true story of Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz and his secret pact with the Tupamaros that financed "El Debate"

For a moment, the official narrative seems unbreakable. Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz, “el Toba,” former president of the Chamber of Deputies, director of the white newspaper El Debate, an emblematic figure of the National Party, was assassinated in Buenos Aires in May 1976 along with Zelmar Michelini and former Tupamaros Rosario Barredo and William Whitelaw in an operation of Plan Cóndor. A martyr of democracy, an innocent victim of repression. All that cheap smoke that most members of the current political system repeat like parrots.

Until his own son, Marcos Gutiérrez, lifted the veil in an interview in August 1997 with César di Candia in Búsqueda and confirmed it years later: behind the bronze statue was a pragmatic politician who, in the midst of subversive fervor, struck a deal with the MLN-Tupamaros to save his newspaper.

“El Debate had a significant financial shortfall and the Tupamaros who had stolen Mailhos' gold had logical difficulties converting it into cash. As far as I know, there was a political agreement by which my father got them a contact to sell one or more bars of gold and in exchange, the MLN financed El Debate for a time,” Marcos Gutiérrez recounted with the rawness of someone who doesn’t need filters to tell the family story.

The Mailhos robbery —that “heist of the century” on the night of April 4 to 5, 1970— was no minor detail. A Tupamaro command burst into the residence/offices of Luis Eduardo Mailhos on 8 de Octubre Avenue and took a safe containing 240 kilos of gold in sterling pounds and bars, as well as millions in cash. A loot that, in full secrecy, was as explosive as it was useless if it could not be laundered.

The guerrillas needed contacts in the “legal” world to convert that gold into cash without raising suspicions. And Gutiérrez Ruiz, director of one of the most influential newspapers of the herrerismo, had those contacts.

It was not an act of charity or naivety. It was an explicit political agreement. The white man facilitated the operation for the seditionists and, in exchange, the MLN injected funds into El Debate, which was navigating turbulent financial waters. Previous conversations with Tupamaros —and also with military personnel, according to Marcos himself— were part of a double game that many politicians of the time practiced naturally. It was not pure ideology; it was survival and power.

Federico Leicht, in his research on the era based on declassified documents from the U.S. State Department, goes further and dismantles the image of Gutiérrez Ruiz as a mere financial interlocutor. According to a document from the U.S. embassy in Montevideo dated June 18, 1976 (accessed by the Informe Nacional program of Radio Uruguay and cited by Leicht), the then-deputy provided the MLN-T with key information used in the kidnapping of U.S. diplomats in Montevideo (such as the cases of Dan Mitrione and Claude Fly in 1970). He was not just a facilitator of bars of gold: he was an actor who, from Parliament and the press, wove threads with armed subversion while publicly maintaining the facade of an irreproachable democrat.

Álvaro Alfonso, in books like Jugando a las escondidas. Conversaciones secretas entre tupamaros y militares (2004) and Los dos demonios (2012), has documented with surgical precision this reality that the official memory prefers to bury: that of the pacts in the shadows between civilians, Tupamaros, and military. Alfonso shows that the violence of the 60s and 70s was not a clash between angels and demons, but a quagmire where everyone splashed around.

Civilians like Gutiérrez Ruiz were not mere spectators; they participated in the dirty game of the time, negotiating with those who planted bombs and kidnapped while the country bled. The “two demons” did not act in airtight compartments: there were communicating vessels, secret conversations, cross-financing, and crossed betrayals.

Alfonso says it without euphemisms: the recent history of Uruguay is full of these agreements that today no one wants to remember because they break the comfortable narrative of unilateral victims.

Gutiérrez Ruiz ended up being assassinated by the same forces he had helped legitimize with his silence or his pacts. A tragic irony of fate. But his death does not erase the facts. The gold of Mailhos, the bars sold thanks to his contact, and the Tupamaro money that kept El Debate alive for a time are part of the true story.

Not the one told in parliamentary tributes or in the marches of May 20, but the one revealed by the children, the declassified documents, and the researchers who dare to dig where it hurts.

Because memory cannot be selective. If we mourn the victims, we must also tell how some of them played both sides with those who would later kill them.

Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz was not a martyr. He was a Uruguayan politician of the turbulent 70s: capable of negotiating with Tupamaros to save his newspaper while the country burned. That is the uncomfortable truth. And it is the only one that deserves to be told.